Although the IESF British Section is not in a position to lead in key technical areas, nor deliver ground-breaking research nor major engineering and scientific papers - what it’s members do have to offer to the debate is their broad multi-discplinary knowledge. As an information provider we can draw upon our member’s scientific, engineering, medical and business expertise to publish and share with members contributions to the wider public debate on the subject.
To start with -
- SPARK! This is where it all begins, sponsored by both French and British embassies - it is an organisation committed to a career exploration and self-discovery programme (for both students and young professionals) that connects them to mentor companies invested in making a difference in their communities. Together students and their mentors explore different career opportunities, build key skills, and access a window of possibilty that was not otherwise available.opportunity. Our members provide mentoring for those interested in low carbon energy.
There are plenty of organisations committed to the same objective and you can find out more by clicking on the links provided below -
Delivering Cities & Communities that work for Society
Delivering Cities and Communities that work for Society The Ethical Challenge.
There has been intense public attention on and concern about our environment, with heightened awareness of the effects of climate change, brought into sharp focus by the CoP26 meeting in Glasgow. Climate change is here now and the effects will only get worse unless we act now. However, if we look forward there is a whole range of other challenges. For example, we will need to address and mitigate the effects of the world’s burgeoning population, which could grow by a third over the next 30 years.
Much interest has focussed on the ethical dimension of not just what we as engineers, scientists and technologists do, but how we do it. Indeed, ethics has been quoted as ‘the new hot topic’, attracting widespread public interest.
Social responsibility is an ethical framework and suggests that an individual has an obligation to work and cooperate with other individuals and organisations for the benefit of the community that will inherit the world we leave behind. Never has the old adage,
’Engineering is the link between Science and Society’ been more apt.
Nevertheless, ethics is much more than this. It is a vast subject area, encompassing amongst many other elements, professional ethics.
Most professionals have internally enforced codes of practice that members of the profession must follow to prevent exploitation of the client and to preserve the integrity and reputation of the profession. This is not only for the benefit of the client but also for the benefit of those belonging to that profession. Disciplinary codes allow the profession to define a standard of conduct and ensure that individual practitioners meet this standard. This allows those professionals who act with a conscience to practise in the knowledge that they will not be undermined by those who have fewer ethical qualms. It also maintains public trust in the profession, encouraging the public to continue seeking their services, whilst at the same time re- assuring clients, insurers and governments.
The various professional bodies, across the engineering and scientific spectrum are refocussing attention on their ethical credentials and in particular, how we educate young aspirants to those professions, a path well-trodden by our medical and legal colleagues.
You can read more on these topics by following the references below both from the recent feature in ‘New Civil Engineer’ and the Engineering Council/RAEng ‘Statement of Ethical Principles’, first published in 2005 and updated several times since.
https://www.engc.org.uk/professional-ethics
John Beck
Glasgow Climate Pact
The Glasgow Climate Pact keeps 1.5°C alive!
Just. UN Secretary-General António Guterres: “It’s an important step but is not enough. We must accelerate climate action to keep alive the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.”
Some key points from UK COP26:
- Agreed to strengthen Nationally Determined Contributions to 2030.
- Yearly political roundtable. Leaders’ summit in 2023.
- Paris Rulebook completed after six years of discussions. Includes process to hold countries to account.
- For the first time, COP agreed action on phasing down fossil fuels.
- Went further than before in recognising and addressing loss and damage.
- Commitments to increase financial support.
Helm: “Woefully inadequate” “At the Paris COP, the world leaders failed to come up with a legally binding set of targets. Glasgow sang from the same old hymn sheet, ..... one more heave is going to crack the climate change problem. “It has not and it will not.”
Sir Dieter Helm is Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford. He was Chair of the Natural Capital Committee, providing advice to the UK government.
How can IESF British Section lend its weight to Net Zero?
On the face of it, there is much to welcome in the Glasgow Climate Pact, though success depends on immediate and determined action by all. Without that, I fear that Professor Helm is right, we – or rather our children and succeeding generations – are staring down the barrel of climate catastrophe.
Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of UNFCCC and an architect of COP21 in Paris, has a good approach: Stubborn Optimism, grit and determination in the face of daunting but unavoidable challenge. Watch her video.
Engineering actions
One of the best hopes for accelerating progress is that many businesses are making firm commitments to net zero, supported by increasing expectations to measure and report progress through ESG, TCFD and other regulatory mechanisms. Considerable carbon emissions derive from carbon embodied in the concrete and steel in infrastructure and buildings and so it is good to see many engineering and construction companies amongst them.
Arup declared on 8th November that it will not take on new energy commissions involving the extraction, refinement or transportation of hydrocarbon-based fuels from next year, having already committedto whole lifecycle carbon assessments for all its building projects.
The New Civil Engineer magazine reports Andrew Wolstenholme, Group Technical Director of Laing O’Rourke, discussing the need to find a procurement pathway to net zero. Laing O’Rourke is one of the many engineering and construction businesses who have committed to net zero.
Two documents, PAS 2080 Carbon Management in Infrastructure, and the Carbon Reduction Code for the Built Environment, provide excellent guidance on how to manage whole life carbon. They should be promoted by government and institutions, and adopted widely.
There are many engineering business opportunities in which the UK can lead, including decarbonisation of the manufacture of steel and concrete, small modular reactors, conversion of coal-fired power stations, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen by electrolysis, and development of battery technologies. And, looking further ahead, nuclear fusion.
IESF and personal actions
IESF and its members are in strong positions of influence. We can discuss these ideas and many others with our families, friends and colleagues. We can lead by example by starting to make choices in our own lives to reduce our own carbon footprints. As a professional body, we have greater reach.
Little public attention is paid to the extent to which consumption drives carbon emissions. For the UK, net imported emissions account for close to 40% of the total emissions for which we are accountable. But, imported emissions are excluded from formal reporting per the Climate Change Act. So targets for future emissions and the means of achieving them are about production and only include UK territorial emissions, not imports. Consumers make choices that impact suppliers and manufacturers: we can choose products and services that reduce our carbon footprint and thereby show that we are serious about rapid reductions. Governments can exert more direct influence by taxing carbon at borders or the point of sale.
IESF members could apply a similar, but simple, methodology to that we should increasingly expect of businesses by setting a baseline and seeing how choices we make can set us on a pathway to net zero. We can then use our wide networks of contacts to influence others to do the same. For success, Everybody (person, family, community, society, organisation, business institution, council, government, .....) has to be on board.
Will The Glasgow Climate Pact keep 1.5°C alive?
As Professor Helm says ‘experience offers no hope that it will’. Momentum towards net zero, or at least talking about it, built considerably in the run up to COP26. What can each of us do to help turn that momentum into real and substantial action?
Philip Pascall
COP 26
“Good COP, Bad COP”
COP 21 held in 2015 in Paris was different in that it was the only one where every country coalesced around the vision of a 1.5 deg C rise. No other COP has achieved such unanimity and Glasgow was no exception; it was back to the diplomatic grind and horse-trading of lowest common denominator rather than any aspiration of highest common factor. The prime minister suggested that the mantra for COP 26 was Coal, Cash, Cars and Trees and these form a useful set of headings to mark the Glasgow Climate Pact or COP Report.
Coal appeared for the first time in a COP Report. Yes, the verb was watered down from ‘phased out’ to ‘phased down’ and it is likely that internationally China and India will pay a price for their late intervention. Importantly for the first time in 26 years of COPs, coal has been acknowledged as a primary contributor to the climate emergency and Saudi Arabia, Australia and the West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin cannot air brush out the effect of coal or fossil fuels on climate. Whether ‘phased out’ or ‘phased down’, any new mine in Cumbria now seems politically dead.
Methane, as part of the fossil fuel family, was another success with 30% reduction by 2030. Whilst methane has only small emissions, its behaviour as a greenhouse gas is up to 100 times that of CO2, depending on the time frame over which it is considered active.
Cash was one of the failures. The prime minister had tried to rally the G20 in Rome to support the $100 billion a year fund for climate adaptation, but commitments are still only 80% of this and it may be 2023 before the target is reached. Although developing countries had proposed a new loss and damages fund to deal with the impacts of extreme events, the US opposed such compensation.
Mark Carney came out with his huge private sector green industry-funding package at $130 trillion. The numbers are huge, but the concern is whether the funding package will change perceptions or whether it is just a good sound bite to hide business as normal with funding of coal and fossil fuels.
Cars were not a major success at Glasgow. Some 30 countries signed a UK led declaration on the phasing out of fossil fuel cars by 2035-2040 but the USA, China and Germany were among those who declined.
Trees were a success with a commitment to save the rain forests by 2030. Some of the signatories were surprising and the behaviour of Brazil and others will need to be carefully monitored over the remainder of this decade.
Txai Suruí, a Brazilian indigenous activist
Image: UNFCCC/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 
Inertia is probably the greatest success of Glasgow. It was recognised that Glasgow was a stepping stone on the route to address the climate crisis. In future, countries will need to report their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for carbon reduction on an annual basis. As importantly, it will also mean that their progress against their pledges can also be scrutinised annually.
The Global Warming Outcome: the hype says that 1.5o C rise is still possible, the head says that 1.5o C rise is only now possible after overshooting to a higher peak and pulling back down to 1.5o C later in the century.
Heroes included:
Sir David Attenborough with his passionate and eloquent plea to the leaders ‘ if working apart we are a force powerful enough to destabilise our planet, working together we are powerful enough to save it.’
Antonio Guterres (UN Secretary General) with his less than diplomatic, ‘Enough of brutalizing biodiversity, killing ourselves with carbon, treating nature like a toilet, burning, and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves’.
The small island states with their dignified, yet angry, stoicism.
Beyond Oil & Gas Association (BOGA) as a Danish led initiative, to phase out oil and gas production. Scotland are mindful to join, it is just whether this is before or after their decision on the Cambo field extraction licence.
Alok Sharma (COP26 President) respected by most and unafraid to show his emotion at the end. Glasgow was just the start of his Presidency that will last to COP27 in Cairo in 2022.
Surprises. The biggest surprise was not at Glasgow, but the bilateral agreement between the USA and China recognising that whatever their political differences, they recognised that Climate was a global challenge that they both faced. Hopefully, this rapprochement can be fed back into the G20 with movement on funding.
Overall Score: it was good and bad in places. The key issue was the impetus that was generated and the urgency with annual updates on NDCs targets commencing at COP27 in Cairo. COP27 will be an African COP, where the developing world perspective will be more evident.
Working Group 3